Howdy folks. A few little goodies from Office Nomads here on this rainy, dreary Friday. Even when the weather is bad, things are pretty good here at the office.

Meet the Sandwich Board!
Oh look at how fancy we be! Office Nomads now has our very own sandwich board, which is out there in the world to draw in the crowds to our ever-more-gorgeous office. Come out and take a look someday - the board loves it when people stop by to say hello. (Photo taken out on our nearby corner. That is not our building in the background - it’s R Place, a local dance haven.)

Ski Bums Shop Night
Ski bums invaded the office late last night, turning the cafe into a veritable ski shop, full of p-tex repairs, edging, waxing, and the ever-coveted cork rub. Classic ski flicks were shown on the “big screen” and a good time was had by all.

Gifts from Nomads
Everyone here at Office Nomads brings a certain something to the office. Witty banter, fabulous website design advice, superior editing skills, and sometimes…bacon mints. That’s right - bacon mints. Your guess is as good as mine, but if you’d like to give ‘em a try, we dare you.

Many of the big names in coworking descended on Austin for the SxSW conference this week.  To kick everything off, we all met up at Hotel San Jose to put some faces to names and talk about what we are doing.  The whole thing was arranged by Julie Gomoll and the people working to open Austin’s first coworking space LaunchPad.  Alex Hillman from IndyHall in Philadelphia was there as was Tara Hunt from Citizen Space in San Francisco.  Marcus Nelson from Citizen Desk came all the way from Wausau but he was bested by Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mireault from Station-C who came in from Montrea.  But the furthest fliers were the guys from La Cantine in Paris.  Louis Montagne even complemented me on my outrageous French accent.  I got to meet Todd and Andrew from NonAnMBA who are in an ongoing coworking blog frenzy. I spent a good portion of the day yesterday with Marcus Nelson, Hillary Hartly (Citizen Space), and William Lawrence (Santa Cruz) and today I’m off to my first BarCamp event.  First I need to find coffee, something they don’t seem to worship here as much as we do in Seattle.

Seems Office Nomads may have unkowingly placed our fingers on the pulse of this whacked-out, work-addled society. I noticed while perusing the New York Times that one of their top-10 most e-mailed stories right now is about this very subject.

“What’s going on now is insane,” he said, assuring me that he used the term intentionally. “Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.” (Dr. Levy coined the term “information environmentalism.”)

The commentary was written by Mark Bittman who describes his efforts to escape work by taking a true day off each week after years of bieng the kind of guy who checks his e-mail in bed at night and as soon as he wakes up in the morning. For the past six months though, come Friday night, he’s been shutting off his phone, his Blackberry, his computers, his TVs and even his MP3 players and disconnecting.

It’s a pretty interesting piece. Lines like, “…I realized that a 70-hour week was nearly as productive as an 80-hour one…” make it a great example of why we put together the last post on finding a work-life balance. I also have to say that I love two terms I learned in the article: “secular sabbath” and “information environmentalism.”

Thanks to Flickr user IamSAM for the use of the photo.